Balcony Stories eBook

dollars! That was a great deal of money.
She had often in her mind, when she was expecting
a prize, spent twenty dollars; for she had never thought
it could be more than that. But forty dollars!
A new gown apiece, and black silk kerchiefs to tie
over their heads instead of red cotton, and the little
cabin new red-washed, and soup in the pot, and a garlic
sausage, and a bottle of good, costly liniment for
Anne Marie’s legs; and still a pile of gold to
go under the hearth-brick—­a pile of gold
that would have made the eyes of the defunct husband
glisten.

She pushed open the picket-gate, and came into the
room where her sister lay in bed.

“Eh, Anne Marie, my girl,” she called
in her thick, pebbly voice, apparently made purposely
to suit her rough Gascon accent; “this time
we have caught it!”

[Illustration: “THIS TIME WE HAVE CAUGHT
IT!”]

“Whose ticket?” asked Anne Marie, instantly.

In a flash all Anne Marie’s ill luck ran through
Jeanne Marie’s mind; how her promised husband
had proved unfaithful, and Jeanne Marie’s faithful;
and how, ever since, even to the coming out of her
lottery numbers, even to the selling of vegetables,
even to the catching of the rheumatism, she had been
the loser. But above all, as she looked at Anne
Marie in the bed, all the misery came over Jeanne Marie
of her sister’s not being able, in all her poor
old seventy-five years of life, to remember the pressure
of the arms of a husband about her waist, nor the
mouth of a child on her breast.

As soon as Anne Marie had asked her question, Jeanne
Marie answered it.

“But your ticket, Coton-Mai!"[1]

[Footnote 1: Coton-Mai is an innocent
oath invented by the good, pious priest as a substitute
for one more harmful.]

“Where? Give it here! Give it here!”

The old woman, who had not been able to move her back
for weeks, sat bolt upright in bed, and stretched
out her great bony fingers, with the long nails as
hard and black as rake-prongs from groveling in the
earth.

Jeanne Marie poured the money out of her cotton handkerchief
into them.

Anne Marie counted it, looked at it; looked at it,
counted it; and if she had not been so old, so infirm,
so toothless, the smile that passed over her face
would have made it beautiful.

Jeanne Marie had to leave her to draw water from the
well to water the plants, and to get her vegetables
ready for next morning. She felt even happier
now than if she had just had a child, happier even
than if her husband had just returned to her.

“Ill luck! Coton-Mai! Ill luck!
There’s a way to turn ill luck!” And her
smile also should have beautified her face, wrinkled
and ugly though it was.

She did not think any more of the spending of the
money, only of the pleasure Anne Marie would take
in spending it.

The water was low in the well, and there had been
a long drought. There are not many old women
of seventy-five who could have watered so much ground
as abundantly as she did; but whenever she thought
of the forty dollars and Anne Marie’s smile
she would give the thirsting plant an extra bucketful.